Nine in 10 Londoners Say 7/7 Has Not Changed Their Lives

Nine in 10 Londoners Say 7/7 Has Not Changed Their Lives

Article excerpt

ALMOST nine in 10 Londoners say the 7 July bombings have made "little or no difference" to them.

Their defiance emerges in an annual survey assessing the concerns of the capital's residents and their views of public services.

The poll found that 89 per cent have been largely unaffected by the attacks, although one in five say they now look out for suspicious behaviour.

Almost two in three - 62 per cent - have not altered their travel patterns but 14 per cent admit they are too scared to use the Tube and nine per cent say they avoid central London.

Researchers put the resilience of the majority of Londoners down to their having lived for decades with the threat of IRA terrorism.

A second factor was the repeated warnings about the risk of the capital being targeted in the wake of the 11 September attacks.

The survey, undertaken each year

for the 33 boroughs, questioned 1,293 Londoners in September two months after the attacks and after the city's successful bid to host the 2012 Olympics.

It found Londoners were divided by class and ethnicity on how they responded to the atrocities, which left 52 innocent commuters dead.

Travel patterns have been changed by 21 per cent of upper middleclass and middleclass Londoners, but by only nine per cent of the working class and benefit claimants.

Sixteen per cent of black and 15 per cent of Asian Londoners said the attacks had made a lot of difference to their daily lives, as opposed to nine per cent of whites. The

report states: "For wealthier Londoners, there may be easily available alternatives but poorer residents are more reliant upon public transport."

Transport for London said the number of Tube journeys fell by up to 30 per cent - about 450,000 a day - after 7 July. TfL predicts it will take two more years until passenger levels recover to the record 976 million in the 2004-5 financial year.

There are expected to be 14 million fewer journeys this year, with the number of trips recovering to reach 969 million in 2006-7. …